Look-alikes

School Of The Art Institute's New Dormitory Apes The Nearby Reliance Building, But It Gets High Marks For Bringing College Kids Into The Loop And Revitalizing The Neighborhood

December 07, 2000|By Blair Kamin, Tribune Architecture Critic.

My outrage meter is supposed to be going off the charts because of a new, look-alike building in the North Loop. But for a lot of reasons, I'm not outraged. Disappointed a little, yes, but not outraged.

We critics, you see, are supposed to hate clones. And the bright, white 17-story college dormitory that has blossomed on the once-unattractive northwest corner of State and Randolph Streets looks an awful lot like the Reliance Building, the great old skyscraper that sits a block to the south at State and Washington Streets.

Upon witnessing such copycatting, critics are supposed to write nasty things like "No originality!" "Retro!" "A failure of imagination!" "A cartoonlike version of past glories!"

Oh, can it.

There is a time and place for bold, brazen architectural statements and there is a time and place for good, solid workaday buildings that serve the people who live in them as well as the cities of which they are a part. The new dorm, which serves the School of the Art Institute, is the latter.

It is by no means perfect. It is in many ways backward-looking. But it's good -- or, more precisely, good enough.

Cities need civilized "background" buildings like this, just as they need strongly assertive buildings that shatter aesthetic precedents. For the latter, think of the mighty, X-braced John Hancock Center lording it over the old beaux-arts buildings of North Michigan Avenue. It's hard to imagine Chicago without that riveting clash of old and new.

The issues raised by the new dorm have broad importance in Chicago, where a trove of past masterpieces -- some still with us, some demolished, still others never built -- provides aesthetic inspiration or fodder for mere copying.

Among the more not-able examples are 190 S. LaSalle Street, the 1987 skyscraper by John Burgee and Philip Johnson, whose twin-gabled crown clearly owes an aesthetic debt to John Wellborn Root's long-gone Masonic Temple of 1892.

Still another building that strongly echoes the past is the PaineWebber Tower at 181 W. Madison St., Cesar Pelli's obvious homage to the trim vertical look of Eliel Saarinen's unbuilt second-place entry in the 1922 design contest for Tribune Tower.

Such allusions were widely associated with the architectural style known as postmodernism, which revolted against the steel and glass boxes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

But today, in the age of architects such as Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, and raucous buildings that look as if they've just been shaken by a violent earthquake, it's rare to see architects paging through the history books -- and even rarer for them to actually admit it.

So there's something very odd about the School of the Art Institute's very un-avant garde dorm, particularly because you might expect an art school to commission a building a bit more adventurous than this one.

Instead, Tony Jones, the president of the school, asked the dorm's designer, Chicago architect Laurence Booth, to engage in a bit of "repartee" with the Reliance Building, the terra cotta-clad 1895 masterpiece designed by D.H. Burnham & Co.

The result: The two stand like bookends on either end of Block 37, the empty city block across State Street from Marshall Field's -- just as was envisioned in a mid-1990s plan for Block 37 that was drawn up by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

The Reliance is blazingly white. So is the dorm. The Reliance has "Chicago windows," fixed central panes with operable windows on their flanks. So does the dorm. The Reliance's facade is divided into three parts, evoking the base, shaft and capital of classical columns. So is the -- well, you know where this is going.

Yet there's more to the dorm than Reliance redux.

For starters, it's not covered in terra cotta but in a material called glass fiber-reinforced concrete. It's lightweight, it's cheap, and it doesn't fall off buildings and conk innocent bystanders on the head, as terra cotta has a tendency to do. Booth compares the stuff, which is made in big panels and was affixed to the dorm's steel frame, with the fiberglass hull of a boat.

The other thing that makes the dorm different from the Reliance is that it's much bigger -- not in height, but in floor size.

Just to the west of the dorm, along Randolph, is an adjoining wing of the same building, its concrete facade tinted a light brown to make the wing appear like a separate structure. Booth's idea is to keep the scale of the block small. A single building that looks like two buildings, in his view, is better than one structure that seems massive and ungainly.

As part of that same urban design strategy, the wing also sets back from the street by roughly 15 feet, leaving room for the Bavarian-style facade of the Old Heidelberg restaurant. The facade, now being renovated in place, eventually will serve as the entrance for a theater housing the Noble Fool comedy troupe.